Is There A Free Speech Crisis At Colleges?

Over the last few years, certain right-leaning public figures—including Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Carl Benjamin—have elevated the issue of free speech on college campuses to one of their top concerns. Searching any one of the four names listed above followed by “free speech” on YouTube, one will find an incredible number of videos dedicated to the “crisis” surrounding free speech on college campuses. Though there are major differences among these figures, they are unified by an extreme concern about the threats, particularly from the left, to free speech. Carl Benjamin, for instance, who is most well-known for his YouTube channel “Sargon of Akkad,” which boasts over 850,000 subscribers, remarked in a video earlier this year that the free speech “crisis” on college campuses “is the single most important issue in all of the West at the moment.” However, is that really the case? If not, to what extent is there a problem for free speech on college campuses? Further, how responsible is the left for the problem?

To answer these questions, we must first examine the extent of the “crisis.” A place to start is to look at the number of disinvitation attempts over recent years on college campuses. These are instances of de-platforming when a group of students, faculty members, or a cohort of both attempt to block a speaker from giving a speech on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedom (FIRE), a pro-free speech group with links to the Koch brothers, has assembled a Disinvitation Database with details of disinvitation attempts at colleges and universities across the U.S. According to an analysis of their data from Heterodox Academy, an organization working to increase viewpoint diversity, from 2000 through 2016 there were 200 attempts at disinvitation by people to the left of speakers—50 of which were successful—and 102 by people to the right—53 of which were successful. Given that 35% of incoming college freshmen identify as liberal while only 22% identify as conservative (according to a 2016 survey), there do appear to be a disproportionate number of disinvitation attempts from the left, but not by such an extreme margin.

There is, however, a more noticeable difference between the left and the right in data on disruptions during speeches. FIRE’s database counts “moderate” disruptions—where a speech is significantly interrupted but the speaker is not prevented from finishing—and “substantial” disruptions—where a speaker is prevented from finishing his or her speech due to the disruption. From 2000 through 2016, there were 27 moderate and 21 substantial disruptions from the left during speeches but only 2 moderate and 3 substantial disruptions from the right.

An important consideration is how disinvitations have changed over time. Another Heterodox Academy analysis of FIRE’s data finds that from 2000 through 2014, there were roughly 8 disinvitation attempts from the left per year and roughly 2 from the right per year. However, in 2016 and 2017—eliminating disinvitation attempts against Milo Yiannopoulos, who accounted for 12 of the 43 disinvitation attempts in 2016—disinvitation attempts from the left shot up to an average of over 20 per year while disinvitation attempts from the right remained stagnant.

In addition to disinvitations, faculty terminations due to political speech are vital to this discussion. Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Acadia University, created a data set of such terminations from 2015 through 2017, finding a total of 45 cases. Of these, 28 were instances of professors being fired for liberal speech, 15 of professors fired for conservative speech, and 2 of professors fired for neither. A 2016 analysis found that liberals outnumber conservatives on the faculty of colleges and universities by a factor of around six to one, so even though professors are fired more often for liberal speech in absolute terms, the rate at which conservative speech is punished is higher.

Looking at these numbers, it is obvious to those of us who value free speech that there is an issue on college campuses. However, it is just as obvious how much of a stretch it would be to characterize the problem as the most important issue in the U.S. today, or even to call it a major issue in the first place. After all, there are 4,583 colleges and universities across the U.S. With a March 2018 Georgetown University analysis, for instance, turning up about 60 incidents in which free speech has been threatened on college campuses since early 2016, it would be an understatement to say that threats to free speech on college campuses are far from widespread. Furthermore, as Zack Beauchamp points out in Vox, in the relatively small number of examples where free speech has been actively suppressed on college campuses, “a fairly large percentage of the targets [have been] liberals, and a fairly large percentage of the others were conservative speakers [like Milo Yiannopoulos] who seem to have come to campus with the intent of provoking students.”

There is another part of the free speech “crisis,” however, that warrants concern, albeit still nowhere near the level recommended by Carl Benjamin and his allies: the opinions of college students. Although there are not many students that take action against free speech, there are far too many who believe that such action is justified. In fact, a 2017 survey of college students found that 20% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans would endorse the use of violence to prevent a speaker from giving a speech. Notice, however, that the problem of lack of support for free speech in this case is actually more pronounced on the right than the left. There are other areas where the left harbors more hostility to free speech than the right—the same survey found that 62% of Democrats support what FIRE defines as substantial disruptions during speeches compared to only 39% of Republicans—but the issue is certainly not unique to one side of the political spectrum.

These opinions are worrying, but they do not reflect a generation that has completely abandoned principled support for free speech, nor do they signal that this generation of college students will maintain the same level of opposition to free speech in the future. A large portion of the students who have rejected free speech in certain situations—by, say, de-platforming speakers they perceive as racist—are doing so out of a worthy concern about illiberal values. Given the commitment of these students to opposing illiberal values such as racism, it can at least be hoped that many of them are capable of being persuaded that illiberalism—in the form of censorship—is not a proper response to illiberalism—in the form of racism.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]What turns out to be the most worrying aspect about the “crisis” of free speech is not the actions of a fringe minority of college students, but rather the way in which this real but wildly overhhyped problem has been used by conservatives to advance their own interests.[/su_pullquote]What turns out to be the most worrying aspect about the “crisis” of free speech is not the actions of a fringe minority of college students, but rather the way in which this real but wildly overhyped problem has been used by conservatives to advance their own interests. For one, conservatives have weaponized the issue not to protect free speech but to increase the presence of conservative voices on campuses. Such weaponization of the issue is evidenced, for instance, by a policy plan introduced in 2017 by a conservative think tank called the Goldwater Institute. Reviewing the plan, The American Association of University Professors commented, “[T]he highly specific measures advanced by Goldwater-inspired legislation suggest that its primary goal is not to enhance campus free speech but to protect conservative voices. It is ironic that, in insisting on outcome rather than process, so-called champions of campus free speech mirror the forms of political correctness they purport to denounce.” In their efforts to supposedly protect free speech, four states have adopted policies based off the Goldwater Institute’s proposals. At least seven other states are considering similar policies.

Even more hypocritically, some on the right are going so far as to advocate censorship on college campuses. Earlier this year, members of Congress introduced a bill aimed at censoring left wing critics of Israel by conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism. As the ACLU remarked in its critique of the bill, “Students and teachers who criticize the Israeli government or advocate for Palestinian rights are the obvious targets. But freedom of speech will be the loser.”

Most ridiculously and worryingly, the right has used the supposed “crisis” surrounding free speech in colleges to create a false image of the left. Rather than looking at the policy positions of those who constitute today’s mainstream left, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and using those positions to develop an understanding of what the left stands for, many commentators have constructed an image of the left based on the actions of a tiny minority of college students who are overly obsessed with identity politics and are willing to use illiberal tactics to shelter themselves from opposing views. This caricature of the left has pushed far too many people—Dave Rubin and Carl Benjamin among them—to reject the left and move towards the right. By realistically evaluating the free speech “crisis” on college campuses, I hope it will be possible to effectively address threats to free speech on college campuses to the extent that they do in fact exist while at the same time preventing the right from weaponizing the “crisis” for their own ends.

Conor Smyth ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at c.smyth@wustl.edu.